[lojban-beginners] Re: lojban-beginners Digest V6 #97

["Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On 6/9/07, m.kornig@sondal.net <m.kornig@sondal.net> wrote:
> My system
> doesn't know how to play ogg files. And the information
> I find on the internet about the specific plug-ins are
> confusing and complicated :-(

I know what you mean, I haven't managed to hear the jbobac archives
yet, but I had no trouble with the wikipedia files.

What about this one:

<http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapter1/vowels.html>

If that one doesn't work for you either, try googling for "IPA chart"
and see if you are lucky.

> So there is no recomandation, no preference at all?

It's important to understand the difference between phones and phonemes.
Different languages divide the phonetic space in different ways, and the
regions of this phonetic space that they assign to a given phoneme may
be different. To my Spanish-language ears, no recommendation is needed,
simply because for me there are only five vowels to begin with. In every
language there is some variation within a phoneme. The phoneme /e/
in Lojban covers the region between the phones [e] and [E]. Any difference
within this region is not phonemic. A native Lojban speaker who doesn't
know any other language will simply be unaware of any differences.
You should not pronounce /e/ more close than [e] because there is a risk
of it becoming too close to /i/, and you should not pronounce it more open
than [E] because it could be confused with /a/, but other than that,
anywhere within that region is acceptable. It should also be fronted
so as not to confuse it with /y/.

If you look at the IPA chart, you can see that /a/, /i/ and /u/ are about as
far appart as can be. There are many languages that have only three
vowels and it so happens that they are these three. Lojban has six vowels,
and they are distributed so as to be as far appart from each other as
possible: /e/ is between /a/ and /i/, /o/ is between /a/ and /u/, and
/y/ is right in the middle: neither front nor back, and neither open nor
close. That's all there is to it.

> I really hate Lojban for its "lassez-faire" attitude towards
> pronunciation. Two vowels (possibly some consonants, the
> "r" and the "l" for example)
> pronounced differently, and beginners will have serious
> difficulties in understanding. And I have not mentioned
> differences with respect to pace and/or with respect to the
> length of vowels.

Length of vowels is not phonemic in Lojban, and I don't know what
you mean by pace, but it's not phonemic either. Tone is not phonemic
either.

mu'o mié xorxes